


please let me know what piece i've lost

by nuricurry



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997), Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Existential Angst, Introspection, M/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:47:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24181576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuricurry/pseuds/nuricurry
Summary: He walks, and he carries Cloud until he can’t anymore. Then they hitch rides or find somewhere sheltered to sleep, in order to wake up the next morning and do it all over again.The world is very large, and walking across it makes him realize that he feels incredibly small.
Relationships: Zack Fair/Cloud Strife
Comments: 4
Kudos: 99





	please let me know what piece i've lost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gravy_tape](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gravy_tape/gifts).



His first gulp of air burns. So does the second, and the third. The air he breathes after coming out of the mako is too sharp, almost acrid, because for far too long he’s been suspended in something wet, his body sustained with pumped oxygen and IV fluid. 

Mako prevents muscle decay. He finds that out when he walks out of the tank on his own, shaky and exhausted, but still able to hold himself up. It seems, however, that the mako isn’t as kind to Cloud. His body was always lithe, but it’s like his bones are made of paper when he pulls him out of the tank and tries to make him stand. For a man that probably weighs something on the lower side of a buck-fifty, Cloud is hard to carry. Maybe it’s because he’s limp, lethargic; he was always told about how deadweight is heavier (though Zack knows that doesn’t make sense) and Cloud is certainly dead weight.

Deadweight, but not dead. Important distinction.

Maybe it’s because Zack hasn’t been doing a whole lot of lifting of anything for the past four years. Maybe it’s the guilt that weighs him down, pulling at his shoulders and dragging his heels when he thinks about what Cloud looked like when he pulled him out of the incubator, saturated with mako. Whatever it is, it makes the process slow going. It doesn’t help that he tires faster, much faster than any respectable SOLDIER should, considering they were pumped full of mako in order to avoid things like fatigue and stamina limits in the first place. He walks, and he carries Cloud until he can’t anymore. Then they hitch rides or find somewhere sheltered to sleep, in order to wake up the next morning and do it all over again.

The world is very large, and walking across it makes him realize that he feels incredibly small.

He’s felt weak and insignificant before-- he could remember being a kid in Gongaga and looking up at the sky at night. Full of stars, each of them billions of miles away, the sky at night put into perspective to him just how little he was. He was one person on a planet of millions, and yet even the most powerful and wealthy among them could not sway or control the stars. He could scream as loud as he could and his voice wouldn’t even break the stratosphere, and when he considered things like size and light-years and the fact that probably at least half of those stars were already long burned out at that exact moment, he felt like an ant standing on a sandy beach. He was small, and at any moment some overwhelming force could arrive and crash over him, washing him away, and no one would even see any trace of him left behind. 

When he joined SOLDIER, that’s sort of when he realized just how powerful Shinra was. He always knew that the company was the end-all-be-all in terms of power and influence within Midgar. No one could do much of anything without Shinra knowing, and without their approval (or in some cases, their ambivalence). But when he was put on the payroll, when he started getting passed folders of reports that talked about securing assets and removing potentially compromised operatives, he felt like a single thread woven into an entire tapestry of smokescreens and political propaganda. Shinra did a lot of good for the people, he kept telling himself, he didn’t join the company, he joined SOLDIER so that he could protect the people. But SOLDIER was synonymous with Shinra, and Shinra had its secrets. He didn’t realize how many skeletons were in those closets, not until he started accidentally opening them up.

All for mako.

When his gums started bleeding, they blamed it on the mako. When everything he ate and drank tasted metallic and sour, they said that it was another side effect, nothing to worry about, that it should go away in time. 

(Except it didn't. He still tastes the mako, no matter what he does.)

The increased stamina, the bulk in muscle mass, that wasn't so bad. Even his hair growing faster was sort of novel, though truthfully it got annoying when it started hanging in his face and he was told he wasn't allowed to cut it. Something about regulations and dress codes and protecting internal information. Whatever; he just kept pushing it out of his face and slicking it back and that had to be enough.

What wasn't so great was the way he felt like he was fourteen again, and with a hair-trigger on his hormones. Someone with a nice laugh would get him rock hard, and for the first seven months, he spent at least two hours a night after patrols jerking off in the shower. He fluctuated between exhaustion and almost manic energy, crashing the minute he walked into his apartment only to then get up and stay awake for the next thirty hours without blinking.

He still doesn’t sleep and still gets hot in the middle of the night and horny during breakfast. Before, he could laugh about it. Sometimes with the other SOLDIERS, but a lot of times (before Nibelhiem, before the tanks) it was with Cloud. He’d laugh when Zack would talk about tasting colors, he’d shave that weird patch of hair that would grow in the small of his back, right above his ass. He’d listen to Zack bitch about the side effects, a small price to pay in order to be beloved, to be the beacon of hope in a world ripped open by warfare, and he wouldn’t mention a thing about jealousy or anger or resentment. He’d listen, he’d suck Zack’s dick, they’d eat way too much pizza and then climb onto the roof of the barracks and smoke pot until four in the morning. 

He misses those days. He misses that Cloud.

He needs a distraction

He tells him about his sister. About how she had to raise him after his mom died, and his dad had to work. She was the oldest of the four of them, that was her job, that was what they were told. But he still feels a little bad about it, because she was fourteen and changing diapers and checking homework and washing sheets. He told Cloud about how she's married now, with a few kids of her own. "Had plenty of practice I guess," he says, and then feels bad. So instead he says, "I know she'll love to meet you. She's always looking for a chance to tell people embarrassing stories about me."

Cloud doesn't laugh. Cloud doesn't ask about his nieces or nephews. He just stares straight ahead, saying nothing at all.

There's a lot of reasons why they share a bed. Zack is barely scraping by on what's left of the bonus check he got two days before he went into the lab, he's hardly got two gil to rub together, and that means small broom closet-sized rooms at inns with a single bed that they split between them. Then there's the fact that he needs Cloud close to him because he helps regulate his temperature. The mako injections fuck with the body in weird and stupid ways, it makes people burn hot and cold, jerking between fevers and near hypothermia. When your entire hormonal structure is rebuilt, it's bound to mess with your body chemistry; at Shinra, they have tanks and inhibitors and doctors to deal with those things. Cloud only has Zack, and all Zack can do is hold him against him at night and hope his body temperature adjusts to his. At the very least he can keep him warm, or monitor just how high his fever gets when they're pressed together like that.

Though that just reminds him of the times before. The times they shared a bed during the war. The times where he'd sneak Cloud into the barracks and they'd fuck for hours because almost dying gives a lot of dudes hard dicks and Zack was still getting monthly mako injections that made him incredibly horny while also making his nose hair grow super long and everything he ate taste like pickles.

Cloud would be tucked up against him, just like now, the sharp bones of his vertebrae pressing into Zack's chest. When he'd breathe, the mako made it so that Zack could hear the slight whistle in his chest; the last lingering effects of childhood asthma. When Cloud would rock back into Zack's hips, he would squeeze around his dick and God, he'd just want to hold him in place so that he could fuck him harder, pound right into him at the perfect angle until Cloud completely lost his breath and nearly passed out.

They never showered together, before. In military training, showers become a thing of function over relaxation. They both learned to keep washing to a science, never under the water for more than five minutes, just long enough to slap their limbs with soap and scrub shampoo through their hair. That was because in Shinra, they didn't have time; the water would go cold, or there would be twelve other guys waiting for their turn to hose down, and so neither of them developed any habit with washing that was beneficial to sharing an enclosed space with another person and a single showerhead. 

Things aren't so different now. It's still a procedure, it's still about necessity. He pulls Cloud out of the tub and goes through the methodical steps of drying him off. He has to be careful and make sure that he doesn't leave too much dampness under his pits or between his thighs, because then he'll end up getting a rash, his skin is so sensitive now. He scrubs hard at Cloud's hair with a towel, because damn it's thick and it takes all night to dry otherwise. Then he helps him put some clothes on, slipping him into a pair of too big boxers and his spare shirt. His pants were washed in the tub right before he put Cloud in there, and they now hang on the bar for the shower curtain to dry. 

"You look good wearing my clothes," he teases as he deposits Cloud onto the bed, his shirt comically big on his smaller frame. Maybe if they had a proper dryer he could shrink it a bit, so that Cloud could wear it and not have his ribs showing through the armpits. Cloud can’t call him weird for his apparent fixation, so Zack promises to tell him again later, when Cloud is feeling better, and he can kick him for being horny about shoulders and clavicles. 

There has to be a later.

He never realized how much the mako affected his memory, not until he started telling Cloud about growing up. It was little things at first, little cracks here and there that he excused as just the result of age and countless experiences overpowering things like birthday parties and school assignments. But when he couldn't recall if his mother had brown eyes or blue, and he sat in the shower, wracking his brain for the name of his only nephew, he realized that something wasn't right.

Most of the time, things were just fuzzy. It was like certain parts of his life were just ever so slightly out of focus, a myriad of colors and shapes and sounds with no definite edges. He knew he broke a bone once, on his bike. but he never remembered which one. It didn't matter now anyway, after the mako his bones didn't break anymore, but he had once been someone else before he was a SOLDIER, and that person had been breakable, and he barely remembered what that was like.

The worst is when he blinks, and a whole day has disappeared. Or maybe multiple days. He never knows, and that scares him. He can't keep track of time, because they just keep moving ahead, trying to keep one step in front of Shinra and knowing what day it is isn't conducive to that. He's afraid to know how long they've been on the run now because that means realizing that maybe it's been a month, or a year, or a century, and he blinked through all of it.

Memories are fuzzy. Feelings, sensory cues, they’re a little more concrete. 

His hands slip down, down, down, from the nape of Cloud’s neck along the curve of his spine, in order to settle at the dip of his waist. He’s gotten so familiar with him, with the shape of him, more now than when they would have sex in the barracks or in cramped bunks during the war. It’s strange to him that he’s grown so intimately aware of another person’s body-- he knows about the freckles on Cloud’s shoulders, the birthmark in his armpit, the scars from some childhood accident on his knees-- without that person being consciously aware of it. It almost feels wrong, like he’s some sort of voyeur. Like he’s crept into Cloud’s bed, into Cloud’s personal space, and taken liberties with him.

Is that what he’s done? He can’t exactly ask Cloud for permission. He can’t really test the waters, he can’t see if it’s okay for them to sleep together, for him to bathe and clothe Cloud, to feed him and hold him together during the nights where the mako is trying to rip its way out of his skin. They were close before, but there was also no definitive ‘them’ before. Just a lot of drinking and fucking and laughing while drinking and fucking. They were friends, but they couldn’t really be much more. There was a war going on, Zack was always gone, there were just a lot of excuses to explain why they hadn’t put a label onto anything.

But now, that left Zack wondering just what exactly they were.

The future he sees always involves Cloud, always includes them, he has lived as long as he has thinking of nothing else. He’s never considered alternatives. And that frightens him.

Worse than Cloud never getting better is Cloud getting better and leaving. Because God, what if Cloud hates him? He did this, didn’t he. Cloud was with him. Cloud was close to him. Cloud could have gone on completely unknown, a grunt in a company of hundred thousands, and never been exposed to mako, never been forced to spend four years in stasis, so much that he was now glassy-eyed and vomiting stomach bile on the regs. Could he say he wouldn’t hate him too, if he was Cloud, if he woke up and the man who ruined his life just kept ruining it? They were on the run, they were fugitives, because Zack got it into his head freedom was worth any price, but he never thought to run those numbers by Cloud, who he dragged along with him.

He was alive, that had to be enough, he kept wanting to tell himself.

But he didn’t even know if they were even living.

Aerith told him once about the sky, and about the lifestream. It sounded nice, a place to go when it was all over, a place that was quiet and where he could keep doing something useful. 

But he also thinks of what his mother used to believe. The stories of the seven rivers of death. With each river crossed, something was lost; a memory, a person, it didn’t matter, it had to be taken away, in order to move on. And as Zack kept him and Cloud moving, and he kept forgetting things, and he kept crossing rivers and streams, he found himself counting, wondering if maybe there was some truth to that, and he was dead, and he was dragging Cloud into death with him.

He refused to cross the seventh river.


End file.
